[NaNo18] Day 16: Gold!

“It
could be gold,” I said. The sun was high above us, and far too
hot for comfort. Our only solace was the fact that the boys’ tracks
were particularly easy to follow at the moment, almost as if they’d
stopped trying to hide where they were going. That was our theory on
why the tracks were so weird for our first couple of days on the
trail. It didn’t make any sense if you were looking at it like it was
a couple of treasure hunters actively looking for new treasure. But
if you assumed they’d already found something and were trying to make
it look like they hadn’t, it got closer. It wasn’t perfect, but
nothing is, and if you wanted to assume that they didn’t necessarily
know how to lay a misleading trail, everything matched up pretty
close.

Hence
my assessment that they had found a whole vein of pretty, yellow
metal.

Tanner
snorted. “Gold?”

I
nodded. “Gold. It could happen.”

“Have
they even discovered gold on this planet?”

I
shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably?” What can I say. I’m many
things, but a geologist is absolutely not one of them. It all looks
like rocks to me, with the only variations that I can usually pick
out being substantial changes in color.

“Yeah.
Sure. And gold is pretty, but it’s not that good for much these days.
Diamonds, on the other hand. Those are useful. Expensive, too. I
could see how one of the underworld bosses might try to kill someone
to make sure he got to keep them all for himself.”

“Could
be a particularly large one,” I said. “A fabled diamond,
larger than any ever found on earth. A previous treasure hunter
caught a glimpse of it but had to leave before he could grab it. The
story’s gotten around, these two actually found it, and your
underworld boss found out that they knew.” I paused and thought
about it for a moment. “That could be it.”